Not only will there be no more prayer rooms, but open prayer in Quebec public schools will now be banned, an extension that opens the door to a court challenge, experts say.
• Also read: Policy passed banning prayer rooms in schools
• Also read: Prayer rooms banned from schools: The Assembly of Catholic Bishops does not support Drainville
As promised, Minister Bernard Drainville unveiled the policy on Wednesday evening, which aims to ban prayer rooms from the school network. As of today, converting a classroom into a “religious practice” room is no longer permitted.
The education minister’s decision came after secondary schools in Laval approved the temporary opening of a “resource” room where students could pray. The school service center had asked for safety as many young people were praying in common areas, parking lots or places reserved as emergency exits.
Bernard Drainville had claimed at the time that he could not formally ban prayer but wanted believing schoolchildren to gather in silence.
In order to “preserve the secular character of the public school,” the policy also states that “no location shall be used or appear to be used for religious practices such as manifest prayer or other similar practices.”
This means that young people attending public schools in Quebec can no longer openly or demonstratively pray within the walls of their school. This was particularly requested by the Quebec Federation of Educational Establishment Directors (FQDE), which welcomed the ministerial guideline on Thursday.
Possible appeal to the courts
For their part, Muslim organizations are examining the possibility of challenging this directive in court.
“We will consult our lawyers to see what our rights are in all of this and we will make the necessary decision. This will be done jointly with all Muslim organizations in the province of Quebec,” said the President of the Quebec Islamic Cultural Center, Mohamed Labidi.
The ban on prayer goes “too far” as it deprives citizens of a “fundamental right”, adds Mr. Labidi.
Experts interviewed by Le Journal also believe that this ban on open prayer, which goes beyond prayer rooms, could be legally questionable.
“The attack on freedom of conscience and religion seems fairly easy to demonstrate. The challenge then is to know whether the state can justify this attack “with the principle of secularism,” says Louis-Philippe Lampron, law professor at the University of Laval, who limits this expanded prohibition “of ‘surprise'”.
“The problem with this policy is that we ban child backs. We are leaving the framework of secularism in the sense of the separation of religion and state. We really go one step further,” he adds.
Human rights lawyer Julius Gray also believes that the directive is based on a certain “ambivalence”.
“When Mr. Drainville says it is not necessary to allocate a room for prayer purposes, he is probably right, (…) it is not the purpose of an educational institution to become a church, he said. But if Mr. Drainville says you can’t pray in school, that’s illegal. You can’t stop people from praying.”
For its part, the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Quebec had already admitted that their faithful would not be upset by these new measures because of their spirituality and their rites, but this was not true for all religions.
The organization’s secretary general, Mgr. Pierre Murray, had specifically raised the case of Muslims who, generally during Ramadan, have to pray in a group “with gestures on the carpet and with a vocal dimension”.
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